Framingham: After long wait, first-time writer chronicles 1930s crime

Monday

Aug 18, 2014 at 12:01 AM

By Chris Bergeron

Daily News StaffFRAMINGHAM - A voracious reader who studied literature under one of America’s great critics, Sumner Korins waited 40 years to finally write a saga of local crime and punishment before it vanishes from memory.Recalling a tale his father used to tell, the now 70-year-old Framingham resident has chronicled the bloody reign of three Jewish criminals from Roxbury who lived, killed and died a decade before he was born.After 20 years research, Korins has published "Black Ribbon: The Rise and Fall of the Millens-Faber Gang, 1933-1935,’’ a meticulously detailed 633-page digital book available on Kindle.It was an unlikely gang, whose roots like Korins’ own, reached back to the immigration of European and Russian Jewry to the United States, fleeing persecution and seeking better lives.The leader, Murton Millen, was a sociopathic thug with a violent streak and a sexy wife from Natick who some say drove the getaway car. His younger brother, Irving, was a leering, dim-witted follower.The gang’s most unlikely member, Abraham Faber, was an MIT graduate with a degree in aeronautical engineering and a Puritanical streak that kept him from kissing his girlfriend.In a crime that dominated Boston-area news for a year, the gang robbed the Needham Trust Company bank on Feb. 2, 1934, machine-gunning two police officers to death before escaping with $14,000.Korins first heard about the Millens-Faber Gang from his father who worried about his future."Their story grabbed me,’’ he remembered. "My father would say, ‘You think you’re so smart. (Faber) was smarter than you. And they all went to the chair.’ "A self-described "secular Jew,’’ Korins has written about the bloody escapades of the gang with the psychological insights of a social historian and the adrenaline rush of a crime junkie.Featuring cops and crooks, hard-boiled reporters and a couple of cabbies who almost got railroaded, Korins’ "Black Ribbon’’ provides a wild ride into a little known chapter of local history that reads like a Bay State episode of "Boardwalk Empire."Yet he has also written sensitively about the tragic consequences of striving families torn apart by wayward sons impatient to live the good life without earning it.Born in Boston in June 1944, Korins spent much of his life circling around the story he might have been meant to tell."As long as I could remember, I could write,’’ said Korins in his book-filled study. "I was always a reader. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have my face buried in a book.’’But he was "bored stiff’’ and earned mostly "C’s and D’s’’ at Brookline High School. "My teachers were puzzled and didn’t know what to do with me,’’ he recalled. "So I ended up at Newton Junior College, a school sometimes described as a haven for underachievers."After earning an associate’s degree, he was accepted in 1964 at the University of Michigan, where he studied American and British literature under John W. Aldridge, an esteemed literary critic who specialized in postwar American writers.Korins’ library holds several copies of Aldridge’s essays. One volume signed by Aldridge urges Korins to "write well."After graduation, Korins never pursued his earlier literary ambitions. He drove cabs for seven years. After working briefly as a teacher’s aide, he realized teaching "didn’t appeal’’ to him.But Korins had one skill that led to near-constant employment. "I could type like a bat out of hell,’’ he said. "I could do 135 words a minute.’’So he spent a "very satisfying’’ career as a "temp’’ worker at area engineering firms and other offices, filling in wherever needed, moving on when finished."When the day was over, it left my mind free to do other things,’’ said Korins. He married his wife, Patricia, in 1978. They didn’t have children.In 1993, Korins read a biography of Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, "The Purple Shamrock,’’ by Joseph F. Dinneen, a seasoned Boston Globe reporter, who’d investigated the Needham bank job and written about the two men whose resemblance to the gangsters led to their mistaken arrest.Something clicked."I’d always had an urge to write,’’ Korins said. "But until I heard about this case, I just didn’t have the subject I needed.’’He spent 20 years "on and off" reading newspaper articles on microfiche at the Boston Public Library about the crime, manhunt, trial and execution of the gang. He got trial transcripts and copies of the gangsters’ death certificates that "gave me the chills,’’ listing "judicial homicide’’ as their cause of death. He visited their graves in West Roxbury."I couldn’t let it go. It fascinated me,’’ he said. "I wanted to know why this happened.’’Korins has the entire transcript of the trial that unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism at the Jewish gangsters who murdered two popular officers, and probably two civilians in earlier robberies.Writing about the gang members' lives, crime spree and the sensational publicity surrounding the robbery, trial and executions, he realized early a "linear’’ narrative wouldn’t work.Only half-joking, Korins said he wrote "Black Ribbon’’ like "a 1930s Warner Brothers film noir crime movie.’’He put his literary studies to use, flushing out major and minor characters, creating atmosphere and using flashbacks to accelerate tension. He explores the gangsters’ early lives and the consequences of their crimes on their victims.Though it took a while, Korins followed his professor’s exhortation to "write well.’’ His "Black Ribbons’’ explores the Jewish immigrant experience, the criminal underworld and the inexorably grinding wheels of justice with a Dostoevskian sweep that’s immensely readable, darkly funny and profoundly humane."Black Ribbon’’ is only available as a Kindle edition or can be downloaded to a computer, said Korins, for $2.99, "the price of a medium latte at Starbucks.’’He dedicated it to "my father, Isadore 'Pat' Korins, who first told me this strange story and encouraged me to write it and share it with others.’’Contact Chris Bergeron at cbergeron@wickedlocal.com or 508-626-4448. Follow us on Twitter @WickedLocalArts and on Facebook.